Some institutions, particularly in the finance and insurance industries, record their conversations with their clients for evidence in case of a dispute. For example, an insurance company may record half a million conversations a year, mainly the details of insurance claims, to ensure that the details remain consistent. Increasingly, such conversations are stored as voice data, usually on optical storage media. They can then be associated with the customer's records and retrieved if necessary.
One problem with voice data is that it requires large storage resources even when compressed and therefore takes a long time to retrieve. One second of uncompressed voice data typically requires 64k bytes of memory and 12.8k bytes of memory with 80% compression of the voice data. Based on these assumptions one minute of compressed conversation requires 770k bytes of memory and a medium sized company with 20operators making an average of 4 hours conversation each per day would require about 3700M bytes of storage or 6 CDs per day at current storage capacities (about 700M bytes per CD at present). Normally the required conversation will be on a CD ROM in an archive and would need to be manually retrieved and loaded into a CD ROM drive to access the data. A large number of CD ROMs are required which can take time to physically load into and out of a CD ROM read/write device even when using a jukebox machine. A manual search for a particular conversation can take considerable time even if the approximate date and time is known. Once one has found the particular conversation one still needs to locate the relevant part and this takes further time.
A further problem is that the required information cannot be directly located. The whole conversation needs to be listened to before the relevant information can be located.
Furthermore it is difficult to analyze the voice data for statistical information, for example for marketing and management purposes.
European Patent publication 0633642 discloses audio data processing apparatus connected to a telephone network for recording voice data from a caller, for instance, in placing a catalog order in response to computer generated prompts. The apparatus records the voice data associated with the computer generated prompts, performs voice recognition on the voice data and uses the text data to place the catalog order.
European Patent publication 0664636 discloses an audio conferencing system comprising a network of workstations having voice conference and speech recognition software. Speech from one workstation is converted into text by the recognition software on that workstation and both the speech and text are transmitted to the other workstations in the conference by the conferencing software. The received text, together with locally generated text is stored in a text file so as to produce a set of minutes for the audio conference.